Apple, Microsoft, and others, a little over a month ago in a letter to the EU, warning that the EU's new proposed unified patent law could lead to more patent trolling:

To mitigate the potential for abuses of such power, courts should be guided by principles set forth in the rules of procedure to assess proportionality prior to granting injunctions. And PAEs should not be allowed to use injunctions for the sole purpose of extracting excessive royalties from operating companies that fear business disruption.

A new front opened today in the patent wars between large technology companies, as a consortium that owns thousands of patents from the Nortel bankruptcy auction filed suit against Google and other manufacturers alleging infringement. Rockstar, which is owned jointly by Apple, Blackberry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony, filed suit in US District Court in Texas. In addition to Google, the consortium has alleged infringement by Asus, HTC, Huawei, LG, Pantech, Samsung, and ZTE.

Companies have a fidicuary duty to maximise shareholder value. This includes going after IP violators hence the litigation. Whilst there is a legal avaune to persue then litigation like this is no suprise and will contiue.

Back in a past life I was one of seven named inventors on a patent relating to video RAMDAC's (long expired). We filed not for the money but for the personal kudos it would give us on our CV's. We worked for a pretty ethical company long since defunct.

So, is changing the law going to be plain sailing?

Not really. Big corporations pay millions of $$$ to Politicians so called 're-election campaigns' just to stop this reform.
If I had my way, anyone who had received more than say $5k from a company should be unable to vote on any legisltation that affected said company in any material way.

Don't just blame the owners of RockStar. Eveyone including Google is partially to blame. Do you really think that Google will sit idly by while someone infringes their patents? Dream on sunshine.